The emergence of the cloud for computing applications has increased the demand for off-site installations, known as data centers. These data centers store data and run applications accessed by remotely connected computer device users. Such data centers typically have massive numbers of servers, switches, and storage devices to store and manage data, so they may be accessed in a convenient manner by remote computer users. Typically, a data center has physical rack structures with attendant power and communication connections. The racks are arranged in rows throughout the room or rooms of the data center. Each rack includes a frame that has vertically oriented slots or chassis that may hold multiple devices such as servers, switches and storage devices. There are many such devices stacked in such rack structures found in a modern data center. For example, some data centers have tens of thousands of servers and attendant storage devices and network switches. Thus, a typical data center may include tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of devices in hundreds or thousands of individual racks.
A typical rack 10 is shown in FIG. 1. The rack 10 includes a frame 12 having a set number of slots, twenty in this example. The top two slots of the frame 12 hold a management switch 20 and a data switch 22. Each of the slots has an associated circuit board (not shown) that allows for connection of different devices in the slot. As may be seen in FIG. 1, the management switch 20 and the data switch 22 each have a number of ports to allow the connection to other devices held by the frame 12. In this example, the remaining 18 slots of the frame 12 hold identical servers 24. Each of the servers 24 have a management port 26 that is connected by a cable 28 to one of the ports on the management switch 20. Other ports may be connected to the data switch 22 (such cables have been omitted from FIG. 1 for clarity).
As may be seen in FIG. 1, the nodes represented by the servers 24 in the network correspond to the number of the physical slots. As performance demands increase, the number of servers 24 installed within the frame 12 will also increase. As a result, the management switch 20 and the data switch 22 will need to be reconfigured to accommodate this increased demand.